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Plum Jelly
Use one pint of water to four quarts of fruit. Cook gently until the plums fall to pieces; strain, and proceed as with currant jelly. •
A skeleton recipe that assumes you have already read the currant jelly entry a few pages earlier: cook, strain, measure the juice, add sugar, boil to the jelly point. The plum-specific instructions here are the small amount of water and the long, gentle cook.
- What four quarts of plums weighsFour quarts measured whole is roughly 5 to 6 lb of plums, depending on size. With one pint (2 cups) of water that is barely enough to keep the fruit from scorching, which is the point — plums are juicy and extra water only means longer boiling later.
- "Proceed as with currant jelly"In books of this period that means: strain the pulp through a jelly bag, measure the juice, allow roughly a cup of sugar to each cup of juice (some cooks used three-quarters), and boil hard until it sheets from the spoon. Modern practice puts the jelly point at 220F at sea level, 2F lower for each 1,000 feet of elevation.
- Choose tart, slightly underripe fruitDamsons, Italian prunes and wild or beach plums set most reliably because they are high in both pectin and acid; sweeter dessert varieties such as greengages are lower in acid. Fully ripe plums have less usable pectin and may not set without added commercial pectin.
- Do not squeeze the bagLet the cooked fruit drip through the jelly bag or a double layer of scalded cheesecloth for several hours, or overnight. Pressing forces pulp through and gives cloudy jelly, a fault the old books were particular about.
- Cook the fruit gently, boil the juice hardThe first stage should be a slow simmer until the plums collapse, 30 to 45 minutes. Once sugar is in, the opposite applies: a full rolling boil for the shortest time that reaches the set, or the color darkens and the flavor turns caramel.
- SealingThe paraffin-wax seal assumed by books of this era is no longer recommended; mold can grow beneath it. Current practice is to fill sterilized jars, leave 1/4 inch headspace, and process in a boiling water bath — consult a present-day canning guide for the times.
- YieldThe yield varies with the fruit and how long the bag is left to drip; four quarts of plums with an equal measure of sugar will fill several half-pint jars.
Plum jelly sits in the canning chapter of a loose-leaf book — a format sold as a binder so a housekeeper could add pages and her own recipes as she went — because in a household without refrigeration the late-summer plum glut had to be turned into something shelf-stable within days of picking. The instruction to "proceed as with currant jelly" is characteristic of the period: currant was the reference jelly, the one every cook knew, and other fruits were described only by their departures from it. Plums were valued for jelly precisely because the tart, thick-skinned varieties then common in American orchards and hedgerows — damsons above all, plus the wild beach and Canada plums — are naturally high in pectin and acid, so no commercial pectin was needed. Liquid commercial pectin reached home cooks in the 1910s, with powdered pectin following as a 1930s product, and together they gradually made this kind of judgment-based recipe, with its sheeting spoon and its cook's eye, less common in print.